Escape the Summer Heat to the Unexpected Delights of a Shade Garden

This time of year I don't feel much like gardening. The unusually hot weather, even in upstate New York, has made the idea of spending time working outside about as appealing as dental surgery.

But one part of my yard actually seems inviting. It's the giant shade garden that lines a hillside behind my house.

Located under maple trees, the bed is filled with plants that require only a few hours of sun a day. Put them out in the more open parts of the yard and many of them would get scorched and turn brown.

Yet unlike the vastly more common gardens designed for sun-loving plants—daisies and irises and dahlias with their showy flowers—shade gardens are a subtler thing. To some people's eyes they can seem monotonous or even weedy.

But once you come to appreciate shade plants you discover they are a world unto their own. Instead of sporting screaming yellow or red blooms, what makes them appealing is the amazing variety of shapes, textures and colors of their leaves.

There are hostas whose big, leathery leaves are quilted like a comforter and outlined with yellow or white edges. The frilly leaves of coral bells (Heuchera) come in shades of purple, chartreuse or even orange. And lungworts (Pulmonaria), one of the first shade-loving perennials to return each spring, have white polka dots covering their spiky green leaves.

That's not to say many shade plants don't put out attractive flowers. Astilbes produce spikes of billowy blooms that resemble ostrich plumes and come in pink, white, purple or red. Bleeding hearts (Dicentra) have dangling red or white flowers shaped like tiny, well, tiny hearts. Even hostas create white or purple flowers on tall stalks—some of them amazingly sweet-smelling—for a few weeks in summer.

There are a few tricks to make sure a shade garden is interesting. One is to use lots of plants with silver or yellow foliage, or those whose leaves are outlined or mottled in white or cream, so-called variegated leaves. These colors stand out in the low light, which tends to flatten shades of green.

Another design rule is to cluster five or more plants of the same type, rather than dot the garden with single plants. You won't get much visual impact from solo plants, particularly in the dim light.

What now is my shade bed was nothing but a jungle of weeds when we bought our house 13 years ago. Gradually we pulled out the brambles and garlic mustard, section by section, to try to turn it into a garden. But we soon discovered that previous owners had used the space as a dump. We filled garbage bag after garbage bag with old glass bottles, rusty hinges, asphalt shingles and other junk.

Inside a Shade Garden

While shade plants are grown more for their unusual leaves, astilbes put out showy flowers. Bart Ziegler/The Wall Street Journal

I worried that the soil may have been too contaminated to ever support plants. But beneath the refuse was a layer of rich earth, created by fallen leaves that had decayed over decades. It was just the kind of "leaf mold" that plants love.

Yet there were other issues. The garden gets just a few hours of direct sun a day, when the slanting light of late afternoon manages to reach under the trees. That limits the plant selection to those that truly are shade dwellers. After killing several varieties of perennials and shrubs that were labeled for use in shade I concluded they required more sun than my garden offers. On top of that, the maple trees suck up much of the moisture during dry spells, creating the most difficult situation for growing things: dry shade.

Still, the garden manages to support dozens of types of plants (though during dry periods I sometimes need to run a sprinkler on them). Homeowners with a shady area that has moist soil are luckier; plants won't just survive, like mine, but thrive.

Shade gardens have a few other advantages for gardeners over sunny spots aside from providing a cool refuge in hot weather. For one thing, weeds don't multiply as prolifically in the weak light—and some types of weeds don't seem to grow at all. It's rare, for instance, to find a dandelion in my shade garden.

And because shade plants themselves also tend to grow more slowly than sun-loving ones (at least in my dry shade) you don't have to spend as much time thinning them out over the years as you do with sun perennials.

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